“Fleximagically Searchable” – By the Rules

During my usual daily blog browse, I ran across this interesting contest by Ryan Stewart. The idea, or at least so it seemed to me, was to see if the new method of swf indexing being hammered out by Google and Adobe would be capable of making content loaded dynamically into swf files searchable. Now, in my opinion, that probably isn’t possible. Of course I have been known to be wrong once or twice. It seems to do that though, Google would have to sniff through the .swf files and discover links to other files (.xml, .php, etc.) then follow those links to see what they contained and index that content. Well, okay, it may be possible, certainly. But, is that what Google is really up to – I doubt it. Regardless, though, it sounded like a great idea for a contest and I thought, hey, maybe someone just might figure out a way of linking to an external file that Google could come along and index. So, I sat down and hammered out my attempt. But then I went back and read through all the comments on Ryan’s  blog post.

It seems someone actually went out and bought the domain http://www.fleximagically-searchable.com/. Not only that, but they then also named the .swf file “Fleximagically.swf”. Well, that pretty much ends the contest, right there. Unless someone actually pays Google for rank placement (which, I guess, would still be cheaper than buying a Creative Suite Master Collection), it’s fairly obvious who will win the contest. And the sad thing is, it will demonstrate actually nothing about what the contest is about. Now, I had no misconceptions about winning, but I was excited to see what people would do in order to win fairly. Hopefully we still might find out.

Anyway, my entry can be seen here. And if you’d like to jump straight to the loaded content (perhaps the deep linking will help ratings) click here. Nowhere in the url, .swf file, or html, will you find the words “fleximagically” or “searchable”. All references to the hot key words are 100% dynamic content added only when you click on the load content button, as the contest rules pretty clearly state. It may not win, but I’m really curious to see if it will ever rank at all…

And I’ll have plenty of time to wait and see as I get back underway for 3 more weeks starting tomorrow. Just when I got most of the salt washed off from the last cruise. The Sea is definitely not my life, my love or my lady. She just lives on the other side of it…